My students put together marvelous podcasts for their final projects in Criminal Justice Administration and Organization during the Summer 2008 quarter at the ITT Tech campus in Culver City, CA.
The assignment required students to select an issue, research the original problem that caused the community to get involved and demand a remedy, the process the community went through to create and pass a law to remedy said problem, what the law entails, and what is necessary to actually administer the law. From there, the student was required to discuss the success or failure of this law for systemic or administrative reasons. Finally, the student needed to cover the consequences of the law, which of course is a systemic question. They could also have discussed the philosophical problems with the law, as some laws are just a bad idea from conception.
Ultimately this was to be a case study on the humanity behind ideology. We dream up these ideas on how to fix society, but we often do not think through the logistics, or the reality, of the situation. For example, prohibiting minors from drinking sounds good in theory, but what are the logistical realities of making it happen? And once a system is put in place, what does it actually do to a society?
Jose Vasquez explores this law and discovers whether we accomplished our mission of reducing teen deaths in car accidents and what it really takes to police this issue. Good work Jose!
The War on Drugs is a good case in point. We don't want people to use certain substances that are physically harmful, but the laws that have been passed in the name of the War on Drugs has resulted in much human misery. Millions have been jailed, our corrections facilities are bursting at the seams, we have pissed away billions of dollars collectively on passing legislation, rounding up and jailing offenders, and maintaining them in correctional facilities thereafter. There are also costs for probation and parole and an increase on our welfare budget as the families left behind struggle to make ends meet with the loss of a wage earner. And of course, we cannot ignore the fact that people's rights have been disastrously violated when these multi-jurisdictional task forces that have to justify their budgets each year storm into minority communities and round up citizens by the truck full. This has happened more than once.
Adriana Cervantes's podcast attempts to grapple with a portion of this issue and she did a fantastic job. Bravo Adriana!
War on Drug Resources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/cron/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/video/
http://www.salon.com/news/special/drug_war/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/walter-cronkite/telling-the-truth-about-t_b_16605.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration claims to have had "Successes in the Fight Against Drugs".
“ In 2002, the Bush Administration set ambitious goals to reduce drug use. The first was to lower drug use by 10 percent over 2 years. We exceeded that goal: youth drug use dropped by 11 percent over 2 years. The second was to lower drug use by 25 percent over 5 years. We nearly reached that in 2007 by achieving a 24 percent decline since 2001 for 8th, 10th, and 12th graders combined.”
~US Drug Enforcement Administration Office of Public Affairs (March 2008). "Successes in the Fight Against Drugs".
But at the same time one can definitely make an argument that it has not worked. In his essay The Drug War and the Constitution, Libertarian philosopher Paul Hager makes the case that the War on Drugs in the United States is an illegal form of prohibition, which violates the principles of a limited government embodied in the Constitution. Alcohol prohibition required amending the Constitution, because this was not a power granted to the federal government. Hager asserts if this is true, then marijuana prohibition should likewise require a Constitutional amendment.
One can also argue that it has been an expensive road. The U.S. government estimates the cost of the War on Drugs by calculating the funds used in attempting to control the supply of illegal drugs, in paying government employees involved in waging the war on drugs, and to satisfy rehabilitation costs. This total was estimated by the federal U.S. government's cost report on drug control to be roughly $12 billion in 2005. In total, roughly $45.5 billion was spent in 2005 for these factors. In 1998, the total cost of drug abuse in America was estimated at $143.4 billion. Similar lack of efficiency is observed in some other countries pursuing similar policies. In 1994, 28.5% of Canadians reported having consumed illicit drugs in their life; by 2004, that figure had risen to 45%. 73% of the $368 million spent by the Canadian government on targeting illicit drugs in 2004–2005 went toward law enforcement rather than treatment, prevention or harm reduction.
In the end its hard to define whether or not the “war on drugs” has actually had an impact in today’s society. I mean, just turn on your favorite TV channel and your bound to see an encouragement of said behavior in music videos, movie ads etc...and its not going to end. It truly comes down to the eye of the beholder, in terms of this policy actually being effective. With today’s economy as it is, it’s a wonder if capital resources are still going to be used as much as they have been in the past. Either way you and I are paying for it in the end. Many hard working American citizens come up short in the end. Again.
Mauricio Esquivel
9/26/2008
Post a Comment